


Last Summer With You

by doyouhearthunder



Category: Night In The Woods (Video Game)
Genre: But if you're looking for Casey-related fics then you probably eat sad shit for breakfast, F/M, More season-based Maesey angst for you!, WARNING: VERY SAD, so dig in my dudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-10
Updated: 2018-08-10
Packaged: 2019-06-24 17:05:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15634995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doyouhearthunder/pseuds/doyouhearthunder
Summary: In the suffocating heat of a summer afternoon, heavy with memories, Mae dreams of Casey, and of things that could have been.





	Last Summer With You

Summer came to Possum Springs like a shroud, heavy with memories.

It was an especially hot August, the kind of heat that made the soles of your shoes stick to the pavement if you stood in place too long. The kind of heat that drove residents into poorly air-conditioned buildings in the daytime and out of them at night, when the sun lethargically sank under the horizon and the moon’s gentle gaze felt like a blessing, a brief reprieve from the sun’s assault. It was heat that had a weight to it, that sapped energy from your body in minutes.

Or maybe that was just Mae. She’d never had much energy in the summer, and this was an especially hot summer. “Probably global warming or something,” Gregg had said when she complained about it, but what the hell did Gregg know about global warming?

Possibly more than she did, if she was being honest with herself. Mae didn’t know shit about a lot of shit, and she was trying to be more honest with herself these days. Maybe that was why she was out here.

She walked alone alongside the train tracks, out to the east of town. Mae rarely came out here alone; on another day she might have gotten Gregg or Lori to come with her, but Gregg was still working the wage slave life at the Snack Falcon, and Lori had gotten her first summer job this year, working her summer away to help support her family. Mae still didn’t have a job, not even a year after her return to Possum Springs, and if even Lori could find one, blaming her unemployment on the town’s tenuous economy could only take her so far. The closest she had to a profession was a part-time gig as a therapy patient, and even getting paid for her time wouldn’t have made her sessions with Dr. Hank much easier to sit through. There was only so much he could do for her when she couldn’t discuss the bulk of her recent trauma.

Today, though, she felt proud of herself: She had skirted the woods that led to the old mine with only a faint twinge of apprehension. It wasn’t that many months ago that she couldn’t go within fifty feet of those trees without feeling her stomach churn with anxiety. So that was progress, she supposed.

The way back might not be so easy. By then it would be dark, and Mae no longer felt comfort in the darkness of night. Darkness was an absence, but Mae had once touched a presence in that absence, and now it would never again feel absent _enough_.

So she’d armed herself with a container of mace and one of Gregg’s switchblades in her pockets, and with the logical rationalization that anything in those woods or in that mine that could hurt her had been buried months ago. Trauma didn’t mix well with logic, though, especially trauma born from something beyond reason.

She was tired of pretending nothing was wrong, however, and she knew from first-hand experience what came of shutting yourself away from your emotions, from the things you were afraid of. Today would be different. Today was for feeling.

The heat was waning in the late evening, though there was still plenty of light to see by. It was a decent hike to her destination, and Mae let her feet and her memories lead her. The air was still and quiet. She’d seen no sign of anyone else out here today, not since the train-hopping crust punks she’d passed camped by the tracks closer to town. Young men in dirty clothes making a pit stop in their Great American Road Trip on the back of a train. Mae had waved to them as she walked by, and at first she didn’t fully understand why. It was only later, further down the tracks, that she realized they reminded her of Casey; of the life of nomadic, untethered freedom that he’d once imagined for himself, that she’d once imagined him having, before she learned the truth. It was a life he’d never had, a freedom he’d never obtained.

He’d found freedom of a different sort, and peace to go with it. At least, that was what Mae hoped was true. Sometimes, on her good days, she very nearly believed it was.

On her bad days, she felt nothing but the chill of the mine, even when the summer sun bore down on her. On those days, the thick summer air felt too similar in her lungs to the stagnant underground air that had filled them, in shocked and sorrowful inhalations, when she found out that Casey was dead.

It was because of Casey that she was out here alone, following in the footsteps of her younger self. She wanted to see if the truck was still there, still sitting abandoned in the corner of that farmer’s field, absorbing memories and heat as it slowly rusted. Not unlike Mae herself, really. The thought made her chuckle darkly.

Finally, after walking so far that her neglected leg muscles had begun to protest, she came to the field. It was quite a large patch of farmland, and although she could see a distant farmhouse across the field, the side closest to the tracks was an unused tangle of tall grass and weeds. And there, just as it had been that last summer before she went away to college, was the old pickup truck, its red and white paint chipped and its windows grimy, graffiti on its sides, the back of its bed hanging invitingly open. It didn’t look like it had moved an inch since she and Casey had come here. Hell, it probably didn’t even run. They had joked back then about fixing it up and getting it to run again, so they could drive it out of Possum Springs and into the great unknown. Who needs to hop a train, Mae had said, slapping the truck, when you could have sweet wheels of your own like this bad boy.

But for all his talents, Casey wasn’t much of a mechanic, and they knew the truck probably hadn’t run in years. Hence its current state, put out to pasture to stand there for time immemorial as a monument to a happier age, when men were men, folks could make a decent living, and pickup trucks from the 70s still had functioning engines.

A rusty barbed wire fence stood between Mae and the truck, but if years of high school “crimes” with Gregg had taught her anything, it was how to get past a measly fence. And this one wasn’t exactly heavy-duty; in fact, when she pushed down the grass, she uncovered a gap between the fence and the ground that looked big enough to fit through. Cautiously, she got down on her belly and crawled under, careful not to brush against the rusted barbs. Had she been any bigger, she might not have made it through, but as it was, she just barely squeezed past the fence unharmed.

Mae picked herself up, brushing grass and burrs off her shirt. She waded through the grass towards the truck. “Hey, buddy,” she said as she patted the side of the vehicle. “Still standing, huh?”

Upon closer inspection, the truck looked a bit more rundown than she remembered; one of the side-view mirrors was shattered, and its front-left tire was flat. It looked like the decaying carcass of a once-proud beast, but it was, indeed, still standing. Still standing wasn’t much, but it was something.

Mae put a hand on the back of the truck’s bed to hoist herself up, and immediately retracted it with a yelp. The hot plastic bottom of the truck bed had grown scorching under the sun’s gaze. She swore under her breath as she shook her hand.

Her mouth twisted in irritation. She hadn’t come all this way just to turn around because the truck was too hot. She didn’t remember having that problem when she had been here with Casey. But maybe it really was a hotter summer this year than it had been then. She couldn’t remember the weather with much detail. The weather had been incidental. All her strongest memories from that day were of him.

Brow knit with determination, she heaved herself up onto the truck, trying not to touch the surface directly any more than she had to. The heat wasn’t so bad after that first shocking moment of contact. When she touched it for more than a second, she found that her hands absorbed the heat instead of being burned by it. It wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t harmful, either.

It was an underappreciated aspect of summer, Mae thought, the way your body stored heat like a sponge. The way it felt like there was fire in your blood and raw energy just under your skin, like your body was super-charged. No one had made her feel that way quite like Casey.

She lay back, even though the bed of the truck was covered in leaves and layers of dust and pollen, and let herself absorb the warmth. Beads of sweat slipped down her forehead and stuck her shirt to her back, but she didn’t care. She watched the sky with half-shut eyes, watched the sun sink low, its intensity gradually diminishing.

The heat made her feel like she was floating, and her thoughts were sluggish, slow to form and quick to wander. She wasn’t thinking about the memories, not consciously, not until her eyes closed and her consciousness retreated.

“Wake up, Mae.”

She blinked awake with a start. In the dark night sky above, the stars shone like tiny jewels. Casey Hartley lay on his back in the truck bed beside her, his palms lazily supporting his head, his green eyes staring at her.

“Wha…oh. Sorry. Did I doze off?” she muttered, propping herself up on one elbow and rubbing her eyes.

His mouth cricked upwards in a grin. “Only for a moment. I considered just letting you nap, sleepyhead, but I didn’t want you to miss this.”

“Miss what?” she asked, and he gestured vaguely at the night sky.

She lay her head back down next to his and looked up at the stars. “Yeah. Yeah, it’s beautiful.”

Casey pointed a finger upwards. “Can you see the constellations? Look, that one is Dohr the Murderer. And there’s Castys.”

 _When did you learn so much about the stars,_ Mae might have asked, had the question occurred to her. But instead she said, “Castys is the one who was drowned by the gods, right?”

Casey nodded, his expression suddenly somber. “But even in the depths, she refused to die.” He looked at her, and there was something in his eyes. Something knowing. He looked older than she remembered, more grown-up. “Should have been your sign, Mae. You did what I couldn’t. Down there in the depths. You didn’t drown.”

Her mind slipped past the uncomfortable memory, avoiding it the way one instinctively avoids a squeaky step on a familiar staircase. “My sign is Mundy…” she murmured drowsily.

“The World Fish,” Casey said. “The whale on whose back rests the entire world. You were that for me too, once.”

She looked at him, his orange fur pale in the moonlight, his green eyes startlingly bright, and she found that even now, after sunset, her body still felt charged with heat. It was in her skin, warm like an electric current. She looked at Casey, at the relaxed sprawl of his posture, at the way his tight jeans creased as he bent one leg at a slight angle. At the way he held his head in his palms, elbows out, his upraised arms hiking up his shirt, exposing a strip of his stomach, the band of his boxers poking up from the lip of his jeans. He was a picture of repose: effortless, sorrowful, alluring.

She wondered if his body felt just as hot to the touch as hers.

Without looking at her, he reached for her hand, and she pressed her palm against his. Their fingers intertwined. His hand, at least, felt as warm as she did. Warm and alive.

“I’ll miss you,” Casey said. “When you’re away at college. I’ll miss having you around.”

“I miss you, too,” she whispered. It was the wrong tense, but he didn’t say anything. He lay there, her hand in his, looking up at the stars. She watched him watching them. The steady, gentle rise and fall of his chest. The familiar line of his jaw. The way his lips hung slightly apart, open without him realizing it, an unintentional, irresistible invitation.

She had resisted the irresistible countless times, whether out of uncertainty, apprehension, self-doubt or fear of losing the easy, relaxed bond between them.

But she no longer had anything to lose. You couldn’t lose what you no longer had, had never had, would never have, save for in dreams. Dreams weren’t much, but they were something.

She rolled over, her right leg pinning Casey’s leg, her hands on the back of his neck and the back of his head, her fingers entangled in his hair.

“Mae,” he said, partly a question but mostly just a statement, like he was stating the inevitable. There was no surprise in his tone, but she thought she saw desire in his eyes.

She leaned her head closer, to make sure.

Her tongue licked briefly across her mouth, wetting her dry lips, and his did the same. She could feel his hot breath gently caress her face. There was very little distance between them, and then there was none.

She leaned into him, pressed in as close as she could get, her lips against his lips, her chest against his chest, her legs tangled with his legs, and yes, she could feel it now, the heat radiating off him. The heat of day, the heat of life. When the summer sun charged her skin and her body held energy like a battery, this is what that energy was for. It had been for him. Every summer together, every solitary night under the stars, every wasted moment…it had always been for him.

Mae’s grip on Casey’s hair tightened, holding onto him, holding onto every second of him, her lips moving with his like the swell of a sea, like her kiss was the only thing keeping him alive.

She only stopped when the tears started falling from her cheeks.

Casey pulled away, cupping her cheek and wiping away a tear with his thumb, impossibly gentle. “What’s wrong, Mae?” he asked, as if he didn’t know exactly what was wrong, as if he could possibly do anything about it, as if it wasn’t already too late for them. It made her blood boil and her stomach twist.

“I wish I’d known,” she said, her voice half sob, half pathetic whimper. “I wish I’d known how little time we had.”

He pulled her into his chest, stroking her head as she quietly cried. “The time I had with you was everything, Mae. You made me happy about who I was. You made me want to be better. You did that, just you, just the way you were.”

“We could have had more,” she sniffled into his chest. “We could have fixed up this stupid truck and run away from here, from everything, before it found us. Before it found _you_.”

She could tell there was a smile on his face. She could hear it in his voice as he asked, “Where would we have gone?”

She pulled away to look at him. He looked fainter, somehow, than he had before. Thinner, as if he was slipping away from her even now.

“Anywhere!” she said. “Anywhere but here. Anywhere I could be with you.”

His eyes weren’t green anymore. The color had faded from them. “You’ll be with me again one day. But not yet. Not for a long time.”

“I should have gotten you _out_ of here,” she insisted.

He shook his head, a thin smile hanging sadly on his ashen face. “There’s only one way out, Mae. Out of here…” He swept his arm out, gesturing broadly at existence. “And out of here.” He placed his hand against her forehead. His palm was cold.

She clutched his cold hand in her living ones. His icy skin leeched away her heat, and she shivered in the warm night air. “What way? How do I get out, Casey? Please, I want out, tell me how I’m supposed to get free of this. What’s the way out?”

She glimpsed hooded figures out of the corner of her eyes, across the field, behind the fence, surrounding them. The stars had vanished. Something was tearing a hole in the sky.

“What’s the way out, Casey?” she pleaded. “Tell me!”

Casey Hartley’s eyes were no longer seeing; there was no life in them, no mind directing their gaze. But still he tipped his chin towards her, and said, in a voice barely more than a whisper, “Through.”

A loud noise crashed against her ears, making Mae jump. Everything seemed to drop away, and then with a sickening lurch, she was sitting up in the cool night air, watching as a train sped past. Its whistle split the night, and the bed of the truck shook as it passed by.

Mae glanced up and around in a confused panic, her heart pounding. The sky was intact, the stars still shone, and she was alone.

She watched the train go by. As one of the cars rushed by her, she glimpsed people through its open doors, illuminated by the moonlight, sitting with their backs against the far wall, heavy-looking backpacks piled next to them. Crusties headed out of Possum Springs, on their way to wherever their next stop was.

She only saw them for a moment, but she could have sworn that one of them had orange fur and green eyes.

Mae lay her head back down on the bed of the truck, curled into a ball, and cried until her body trembled and her sobs died down into tiny sniffs and whimpers. She didn’t know how to live with this. No one had ever taught her how to grieve. Not like this. Not for someone who should have had so much more time. Who should have had so much more time with _her_.

For a while she just lay there, unmoving. Then she picked herself up, got down from the truck, crawled back under the fence, and turned her feet towards home.

It was late. Later than she’d meant to stay. She’d told her parents that she was spending the night at Gregg and Angus’ apartment, but Gregg was still working the late-night shift at the Falcon. She would go there. She would buy a soda, and she would help him close the store. And she would tell him about the dream…maybe.

Gregg was the only person she could talk to about Casey, the only one who’d known him as well as she had. But she didn’t know if she could put words to what she was feeling, to what she _had_ felt in that dream. It had been so real, so vivid, more vivid than any dream she’d had since the ones from before the mine.

She didn’t feel drained like she had after those dreams, though. She felt _hot_ , and sad, and confused and frustrated and miserable and grateful. She felt too many things.

She kept her hand clenched around the handle of the knife in her pocket the whole way past the woods outside of town.

Something stirred in the shadows at the tree line, rustling the branches of the undergrowth. Mae froze, her heart in her throat, the knife in her hand. Glowing eyes stared at her from the trees – but small, low to the ground, and then they turned away and the creature they belonged to scurried off into the bushes. A possum, probably, or maybe a raccoon. She heaved a sigh and forced herself to calm down.

 _Everything in those woods that can hurt you is buried beneath tons of rock_ , she told herself, and then part of herself answered back, _So is everything you love_.

She shook her head forcefully. It wasn’t true. She loved Gregg and Angus and Bea, and her parents, and Lori and Selmers and hell, even Germ. And they loved her. There was so much love for her in Possum Springs.

But none of them were Casey. Casey had been irreplaceable, and he had only gotten so many summers, and all of them were gone now. That summer when they had stargazed in the back of a pickup truck had been the last, and it hadn’t gone like it did in her dream. In reality, they had spent a lovely, pleasant evening together, and then gone home with so much of the night’s potential unfulfilled. Unfulfilled potential would always be burrowed into the back of her memories of Casey now, What Was at odds with What Could Have Been.

Had he felt the same way back then? Had they both felt it, and never acknowledged it, never admitted it to themselves, let alone to each other?

Her head throbbed. Mild heatstroke, probably; she’d been an idiot and had forgotten to bring any water.

Mae clutched her head and growled in frustration. There was no use torturing herself, she knew that. What had happened had happened, and the fact that it had happened without her knowledge while she was far away, wrapped up in her own bullshit and powerless to stop it, well…that was something she was going to have to live with somehow. She’d made it this far. There would be no easy outs for her; she owed him that much. She owed him her resilience. Someone had to keep him alive in their memories and dreams.

She padded into the outskirts of town on tired legs, past the abandoned Food Donkey and towards the familiar, comforting streets of Possum Springs. Most of the town lay dark and quiet at this hour, but the florescent glow emanating from the Snack Falcon pierced the night like a beacon for weary travelers. Mae could see Gregg through the window; he was asleep on the job, his head cradled in his arms on the counter. She wondered if he was dreaming of Angus, of a lover still very much among the living.

She was going to wake him up.

Mae Borowski had heat under her skin and a hole in her heart, but with a glance at the stars and a tired sigh, she opened the door and stepped into the bright, calm light.

**Author's Note:**

> As usual, that got a little more depressing than I intended. What can I say? I'm not living up to my own standards unless I can make myself sad. And let me tell you, the thought of Mae only realizing she was in love with Casey after he's dead and gone hurts my heart.
> 
> If the fic hurt your heart too, and you want to express your sorrow, anger, awe, gratitude, resentment, etc, please consider leaving a comment! I'd love to hear from ya. Thanks so much for reading!


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